telecom@eecs.nwu.edu (TELECOM Moderator) (04/04/91)
As many of you know, this past weekend there was a major problem on portions of the Internet with a network server which caused a great deal of mail (including a dozen or more issues of the Digest) to go undelivered; get bounced back to the sender; or get delivered in some random and unpredictable order. In the case of this Digest, there were numerous instances of duplicate and triplicate copies of issues; in many instances missing issues; and in general a lot of havoc including out of numerical order delivery. I've been spending literally *hours* here the past couple of days responding to requests for missing issues, answering complaints of 'did you get my article; why did I not get a reciept; why has it not been published, etc' ... Because I physically cannot work 24 hours per day -- or even several hours per day on a regular basis -- on the Digest, and because there has been a huge flow of stuff arriving in the past few days which was clogged up in the system over the weekend, I had to take a rather drastic action: most articles received in the past few days have been returned to the sender with a request that they be held at least a week or so, and only submitted if they remain relevant at that time. Quite honestly, in the nearly three years I have been involved in the production of this Digest, I have **never** seen a backlog as I have experienced the past three days! You will note there were no Digests at all on Wednesday ... I spent several hours handling administrative mail. So, if you sent an article here anytime since last Sunday and got it back with a form letter saying 'thanks, but no thanks', do not take it personally ... about 95 percent of the other correspondents got the same thing ... and at that, I still have enough here to fill a couple issues today! In all, about 100 messages were returned unused. Again, PLEASE read all replies before you write your own. If the topic is covered (or saturated is more like it), then DO NOT send anything. Do not send your article here and to an unmoderated telecom (or other) newsgroup at the same time. One person did that Monday and I am still getting copies of his two line, totally irrelevant message. 237 copies have arrived so far. You MUST write to this group by mail. You cannot post messages direct. PAT